foraged food Archives – Mamma's School

Rhubarb Muffins – A Pink Treat!

On 02/11/2017

These rhubarb muffins are delicious (especially warm), moist, and to the delight of my little lady, they have a pink tinge. My baking recipes are very simple and vague, but this is deliberate and makes life very easy 🙂 We didn’t have to go far to forage for our rhubarb as we have an abundance in our garden, and after already making rhubarb wine, the rhubarb muffins was a great way for the children to enjoy this garden produce too.

The Ingredients:

300g rhubarb (once leaves and ends are removed), chopped up.

1/2 mug butter.

1 mug sugar.

2 eggs.

1 teaspoon vanilla essence.

2 cups of flour.

1 teaspoon baking powder.

1 teaspoon baking soda.

Method:

Clean and chop the rhubarb up. Place in a pan, submerging 2/3 of the rhubarb in water.

Bring to the boil, then simmer (stirring occasionally) until all the rhubarb is soft (stewed).

Cream the butter and the sugar.

Beat in the eggs.

Add the rhubarb and vanilla essence.

Mix the flour, baking soda, and baking powder together, and then gradually mix into the wet ingredients.

Spoon into muffin cases 3/4 full.

Cook at 190 degrees for 15-20 mins.

Remove the rhubarb muffins from the oven and allow to cool. If you can eat these slightly warm they are scrummy, but taste good cooled too 🙂

Campfire Blueberry Cake – A Foraged Pudding

By Mammas School

On 14/09/2017

In Outdoor Cooking

If you are looking for a tasty, early autumn, foraged campfire treat, then this blueberry cake is your answer. I have to admit though, this time round we used bought blueberries as I knew it was going to be a very wet hike!! The recipe is very vague, deliberately, as outdoor cooking is best kept that way as it makes it a lot more simple!

Ingredients:

Eggs (I work on 1 per person)

Slices of bread (I work on 1 per egg) and broken into small chunks

Blueberries (for 3 people, 2 handfuls were perfect)

Tablespoon of creme fraiche (1 tablespoon per 3 eggs)

1 tablespoon milk (per 3 eggs)

A liberal sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar

Method:

Mix all of the ingredients together in a pan, then place it onto the fire to cook. Stir it every so often to prevent it burning and sticking to the pan. It will take around 5-10 minutes, and will be ready when the egg makes the rest of the ingredients start to set. This is such a lovely warm, fruity treat, and my trio wolfed it down, although they had hiked first and it was pouring with rain 😉

Stewed Blackberry and Cinnamon Apples.

By Mammas School

On 31/08/2017

In Foraged Food Recipes, Outdoor Cooking

Stewed blackberry and cinnamon apples are a true foraged autumn treat. They are extremely easy to make on the go, and very warming cooked on the fire in the great outdoors. To make our stewed blackberry and cinnamon apples, the only ingredient we carried was the cinnamon sugar mix, the rest we foraged on our bike ride around our island before we set up our fire to cook on 🙂

Ingredients:

So what do you need for this yummy treat of stewed blackberry and cinnamon apples?

A mix of ground cinnamon and sugar together (I just add sugar to the ground cinnamon until I am happy with the flavour).

Apples (1 per person) cored

6-8 blackberries per person

Please note, you will need to carry a corer (or knife as this will work if you slice the apples too), and tin foil for cooking the apples in on the fire.

Method:

Assembling the stewed blackberry and cinnamon apples ingredients together is also beautifully simple. Once the apples have been cored, place onto a piece of tin foil, stuff blackberries into the centre, sprinkling liberally with the cinnamon sugar as you go, and then all over the top too. Once this is done, wrap the apple in the tin foil. Place the foil packets directly onto the fire, and they should be cooked in 5-10 minutes, depending on the ferociousness of the fire. A good indicator is the parcel is very soft when pressed gently. Unwrap, and place into a dish to eat. Sit back and enjoy the view 🙂

Dandelion Cookies – The Flowery Biscuit!

By Mammas School

On 09/05/2017

In Foraged Food Recipes

Our garden is a little bit of a dandelion farm, so it got me thinking, what could I make with these golden flowers, other than fairy potions and posies!! So we tried to make biscuits with them, and it worked! This recipe makes 12-15 dandelion cookies, and as usual I have had to make three batches (having three children), so have a plentiful supply!! If the thought of eating dandelions makes you feel a little enough, you only need to consider their health benefits and you might be swayed. Bear in mind these are the health benefits for only the flowers, the rest of the plant has even more health benefits to it! They are a great source of antioxidants, they can help relieve aches and pains (more specifically from headaches, backaches, and menstruation), the can help tummy aches, they contain vitamin A and B12, and have antibacterial effects in the pollen 🙂

So what ingredients do you need for your dandelion biscuits?

Pick 15 dandelion flower heads.

100g butter

80g sugar

1 egg

1 lemon, zest and juice

150g plain flour

20g cornflour

and a pinch of baking powder.

Method:

Wash the dandelion heads, and then pluck off all the petals into a bowl

Cream the butter and sugar together

Add in the egg, stirring well

Add the plain flour, the cornflour, and the baking powder

Add the zest of the lemon, the juice of the lemon, and the dandelion petals and stir well

Place overloaded teaspoon sized dollops onto baking paper, and spread out well.

Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 12-15 mins

…..then tuck into your dandelion cookies!!!

Tuna and Chive Burgers – A Family Friendly Outdoor Treat.

By Mammas School

On 30/03/2017

In Foraged Food Recipes, Outdoor Cooking

These tuna and chive burgers are the first of my outdoor cooking recipes that feature foraged food! We have now got an abundance of chives popping up all over the forest and wood floors, so it was time to make something delicious to eat with this versatile herb. This is a meal that can be prepared and taken out, or easily made by the camp fire. We had got very gusty winds the day we ate this, so I made them at home, and parcelled them all up ready for placing on the fire.

The ingredients required are:

Foraged/fresh chives

Tuna fish

Flour

Eggs

Baps (for putting them in after cooking)

I used two tins of tuna fish, 2 eggs, and 2 desert spoons of flour. Mix it all in a bowl. Then snip the chives finely into the mix. This is based on personal preference, so snip as much or as little as your taste buds will like. Then stir away. I then rolled the mix into balls and flattened into a burger shape. This mix made 6 burgers. I would advise cooking these in a pan. However, I knew that the fire pit we were going to had no grill over it, and also the extreme wind would make any pan cooking very difficult today. Therefore ours were placed on the fire wrapped in tin foil. It worked, but you need to remember to turn the foil packet over to cook them on both sides, and not leave them on too long as they are easy to char in foil. Remove from the foil once cooked (ours took around 10 minutes), and then place in a bap. My trio squirted salad cream onto theirs for a topping.